From prolific historian Smith (Killing the Spirit, 1990; Redeeming the Time, 1986, etc.): a genealogy of democracy that rejects Max Weber's ``Protestant ethic''—which equates democracy, Christianity, and capitalism—and instead places the democratic impulse squarely in the Christian communalist tradition. Christian doctrine, says Smith, is the basis of our American belief in the equality and unity of all men and women before the law, and in the eyes of God. These ideas first erupted into human consciousness in the Hebrew Bible, and found their clearest expression in the teachings of Jesus. For a thousand years, Smith says, the Catholic Church nurtured the dignity of human life and elevated the status of women to heights unknown in non-Christian cultures. With the Reformation, Protestantism—and American Puritanism in particular—took the lead in the cause of human rights, promoting ``convenanted communities,'' quasi-socialist societies with no room for such capitalist practices as unbridled competition and monopolization. The Reformation left its stamp on many pivotal American events (``radical Protestants freed the slaves''), and the New Deal, Smith argues, was a ``Christian socialist revolution'' led by devout churchgoers, including FDR and Henry Wallace. Today, America's moral leadership lies with black Protestantism and a revitalized Catholicism, which may restore Christianity to ``its classic role as the critic of capitalism.'' Smith's attempt to divorce Christianity and capitalism is only half-successful (see Michael Novak's The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1992, for a pro-capitalist Christian argument); still, a forceful and elegant demonstration of the close alliance between Christianity and democracy on American soil.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10531-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
The freshest, most elegantly written of the new books about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 1107, The Hidden Scrolls, p. 1108). In this very thorough study, Golb (Jewish History and Civilization/Univ. of Chicago) surveys earlier scholarship on the topic and finds it wanting. Almost all of the individuals and groups who have devoted themselves to piecing together and deciphering the scrolls and fragments found between 1947 and 1955 have believed they were written by scribes of the Essene community who lived in the ``monastery'' of Qumran not far from the shores of the Dead Sea. In 1980 Golb advanced his own explanation of the scrolls' origins: Qumran was not a monastery but a fortress, he argued, and the scrolls represent the remnants of the libraries of Jerusalem's various Jewish sects, who, in order to preserve their manuscripts from the Roman conquerors in the first century a.d., hid these religious and literary treasures in the Dead Sea area. Backing up his assertions here, Golb makes accessible some very technical material, demystifying the process of manuscript discovery, reconstruction, and decipherment. While many of his academic adversaries have depicted him as an upstart and a professional gadfly, he emerges from this volume as a reasoned, impassioned advocate of a more likely scenario for the concealment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He doesn't spring his solution on us suddenly; he includes the reader in the process by which someone who has been involved in scroll research for the better part of his life, who once accepted the ``Qumran Hypothesis,'' began to see problems with it in the early '70s and eventually developed a compelling alternative. While detailing that process, Golb also chronicles the battles for control of the scrolls' possession and publication, a story that has been told before, though not in such exhaustive detail. The legions of scroll aficionados around the world can now read of conflicts both ancient and modern in a lively and informative new book. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-544395-X
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A courageous, often profound, and extraordinary attempt by one of England's best historians to cut through the pessimism and parochialism of the profession and to find the bonds of humanity underlying its conventional divisions. Zeldin (History/Oxford Univ.; The French, 1983, etc.) ranges with prodigious learning over different civilizations and epochs, dealing with subjects as disparate as why men and women find it difficult to talk to one another and why political scientists have misunderstood the animal kingdom. His method is anything but academic: He starts most chapters with an interview or description of a person, usually French and usually a woman (``because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes'') before broadening the discussion to analyze the nature of the concerns expressed, their historical origins, and the ways in which different civilizations have dealt with them. In doing so, he raises some questions shunned by the academic world and asks others more likely to be raised in magazines and self-help books: ``Is it inevitable,'' he asks, ``that as women become increasingly adventurous and have ever higher expectations of life, they will find men less and less adequate?'' Why are humans ``still so awkward...with even 40 per cent of Americans...complaining that they are too shy to speak freely?'' In answering questions like this, he repeatedly produces the unusual fact or the revisionist view: Writing of Islamic societies, for instance, he notes that sociability, not war, is considered the defining element of the good life. Ultimately, this is a call for a sense of the richness of life and for optimism, which he defines as ``awareness that despite nastiness and stupidity, there is something else too. Pessimism is resignation, an inability to find a way out.'' Not always as skeptical as he might be (Stalin and Hitler, he says, ``remained desperately hungry for respect''), but no short review can do justice to the richness, humor, humanity, and range of this important book.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017160-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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